Tanzquartier Wien

18 January 2019, 10:46

Diane, I have just received a confidential message via electronic mail:

Dear Jack,

I hope you are well.

As you know, David Wampach will be coming to Tanzquartier next week, and a free ticket has been left at the box office for you for the Thursday.
Would you like an accompanying ticket for 10 euros?
I have enclosed some information and links, especially on “endoticism”, which Wampach refers to …

All the best!

Library & TQW Magazin
Christina Gillinger

18 January 2019, 23:43

One of the two links takes me to the website of TIER, the acronym for The Institute for Endotic Research. According to the website, the institute is dedicated to research about forms of generation and presentation of subject matter related to the endotic – an antonym for exotic. French writer George Perec used it as a conceptual tool to approach everyday life in his own immediate surroundings. He thus proposed to preserve the fascination of exploring while at the same time avoiding the concept of the other. Names are tokens that drop into the slot of life. They are assignments.

ENDO by David Wampach is going to be my next assignment, so which name am I going to use for it? Dale B. Cooper? My own? Or what?

Diane, as Groucho Marx said: “Harpo, you talk too much.”

Good night, Diane.

19 January 2019, 10:28

Diane, I’m on my way to Horn. My father is ill. I will get back to you as soon as I know more about his condition.

20 January 2019, 02:01

Phrases from César Aira’s essay “Cecil Taylor” provide me with four hours of rest overnight in Horn: “Eyes closing once and for all, always and everywhere. Peace. And yet there is an uncontrolled movement that is more clearly discernible than we could have hoped for, and that causes fear in others and is the model of our own impossible fear. It’s what’s called art.”

I have nothing to add, Diane.

20 January 2019, 08:11

Diane, I am sending you this message even though I’m still in the dark concerning my father.

In a newspaper clipping from 2014 about an exhibition of Gutai, the Japanese post-war group of artists, in the Guggenheim Museum, the journalist demands: Art history? Please rewrite!

Enclosed please find more information about the group of artists, Diane.

In 1954, Jirō Yoshihara was involved in founding this society for concrete art. With “gutai” (which has been translated as “embodiment”, or “concrete”) as their motto, a total of 59 artists experimented with new forms of art to break the boundaries between art and life, from the earliest festival-like exhibitions until 1972. The body was essential, but the body had no priority over the materials. Instead, it was considered a collaborator of the material.

Diane, in Vienna’s independent dance and performance scene during the 1990s, I came into contact with similar ideas, which is why I’m looking for a dietheater programme announcing the Lux Flux performance INFRAMINCE for “imagetanz 99 – Grotesque, Irony and Body Joke”. But I can’t find it in any of the drawers in the office. A yellow sheet of paper with the following note is the only clue I have:

According to Marcel Duchamp, inframince (prominently placed in the US American “View” magazine in 1945) is when the tobacco smoke also smells of the mouth which exhales it. Then the two odours are married by inframince. “The sound produced by corduroy trousers when the two legs rub together while walking; the act of painting on glass, seen from the unpainted side; the sensation of skin softening while dancing cheek to cheek; the idea that emerges when the interplay of the senses crosses the mind; the warmth of a (recently vacated) seat” – all that is inframince.

21 January 2019, 19:07

Diane, even as far back as in my note from 10 January 1977 I remarked that I always address the voice recordings to you, even when it’s obvious that I’m talking to myself. It’s reassuring to have someone with as keen a mind as yours behind me.

22 January 2019, 13:39

Christina has just sent me another link. It takes me to David Wampach’s artist video on tqw’s website. I’m very pleased to be able to work on this, Diane.

David Wampach choreographed ENDO together with Tamar Shelef for Montpellier Danse. It’s yet another portrayal of a moment in history, this time from the point of view of Japanese avant-garde poet and filmmaker Shūji Terayama, attempting “to examine that which truly comes from within and which we have overlooked until now, […] to investigate that which no longer seems to surprise us, […] no longer exotic, but endotic”, as writer Georges Perec once put it.

22 January 2019, 17:03

Diane! And erotic. In 1981, Shūji Terayama directed the Franco-Japanese film “The Fruits of Passion” featuring Isabelle Illiers and Klaus Kinski, based on Dominique Aury’s novel “The Story of O”.

23 January 2019, 14:11

Concerned about my approach regarding tomorrow’s assignment in Hall G at MuseumsQuartier Wien. Again, César Aira’s essay helps me stay on track: “Who would boast of knowing what’s rubbish and being able to tell it apart from its opposite? Nobody who writes, at any rate.” Right, Diane?

24 January 2019, 10:40

Diane, the artist Jonas Mekas, whose filming style was diary-like and yet timeless, died yesterday in New York City, aged 96. I recall his intimate coolness, such as in a statement of his from the 1980s: “The spirit of the experimental film continues to live on as long as there’s still someone roaming the streets of the Lower East Side with a Super 8 camera.” Also thinking of dancer Daniel Lepkoff and photos of his mother Rebecca from the 1940s and 1950s in what was then a poverty-stricken immigrant neighbourhood in Manhattan.

24 January 2019, 15:27

I will try to touch on tonight’s events in the context of ENDO through writing.

24 January 2019, 23:24

Way off the mark with my inquiries up to this point! I should have looked into circus arts, variety entertainment and nightclubs in films of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, into the timeless pleasures of an urban community.

Here’s what I can report to you, Diane. Just before the beginning of the performance, I heard a dialogue behind me in the audience: “The diaphragm presses against your heart, and you’re dead.” “Yes. There are so many terrible ways to die.” After that, things went on in the same ironic manner onstage as well. Tamar Shelef, like a female bird-dancer with a black, ankle-length cooking apron dangling in front of her naked body, alone. Entering David Wampach, the male protagonist, alone. A cloaked boxer wrapped in an overlarge bath towel, he hops about for a couple of rounds in the minimalistic stage set. I cannot call Beckett’s television play to mind. Others do. What else can I say? The stage set is a white angle of walls with a connecting area of white floor. Yes, now I remember, Diane, the black glove was terribly funny, intentionally swaying between the boxer’s legs, almost like an udder. And in the twilight world that followed I wondered if Adam and Eve enjoyed themselves as much in preparing for the expulsion from Paradise. The artist couple leaving prints of their body shapes covered in colour against the two walls of the angle also brings back memories. In 2002, in his Fabbrica Rosa, Harald Szeemann showed the Italian exploitation film “Mondo Cane” (1962), containing footage of Yves Klein’s well-known “ANT 82” performance. Harald said that Yves wasn’t happy at all about being mistakenly introduced as a Czechoslovakian artist and that his performance was embedded in a pseudo-documentation about the world of bizarre human actions. I consider this to be an important question. Who does one perform for? People and things perform for people. It would be more pataphysical if colours were to perform for colours and fragrances. In the case of ENDO, I thought for a moment that we, the audience, were co-performing, sitting in the stands. I could go on writing like that for a long time, bringing the female figure’s ingenious hazmat suit into play. And the male figure’s masterly bound angle pose into the red puddle of paint spread on the floor. And the transformation of the two into superheroes by way of action painting. And the depletion of a dance music. And the shameless physical exhaustion. Perfect! It was “a grand funferall”, as Irish writer James Joyce put it in his novel “Finnegans Wake”.

Good night, Diane.

JACK HAUSER Born in Horn in 1958, studied electroacoustic music in Vienna from 1983 to 1986 after working as a chemist. “Erzklapperatist & Ex.Filmemacher” with a Super 8 film collection (“Banditengesänge”, 1986–2009). Jack Hauser has co-written experimental adventure novels in the form of romance novels for all and none with David Ender since 1989. He co-founded the performance band Lux Flux with Inge Kaindlstorfer and David Ender in 1994. Collaboration with Milli Bitterli from 2003. He co-developed the performance series The Call of Things with Lisa Hinterreithner in 2014/15. Various works co-created with Sabina Holzer since 2005 (www.cattravelsnotalone.at). He has designed and continues to work on the fantastic vehicle “Apartment Miryam van Doren” since 1999.

[1] Agent Dale B. Cooper is the protagonist of David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks (1990-1991; 2017).

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